&#8216;Weak&#8217; verbs, also known as &#8216;parenthetical&#8217;, &#8216;evidential&#8217;&#160;or &#8216;epistemic&#8217; verbs, have interested linguists and philosophers for many years. In recent analyses they are treated mainly from a pragmatic point of view, and, through a process of advanced grammaticalization, they are often grouped together with adverbs. But fine-grained linguistic analyses are still lacking. In this contribution, we present the main results of a usage-based syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of the three most frequent &#8216;weak&#8217; verbs used in the first person singular in modern French: je crois (&#8216;I believe&#8217;), je pense (&#8216;I think&#8217;), and je trouve (&#8216;I find&#8217;). We argue that those verbs do not undergo a change of category but simply remain verbs and that they can be fruitfully described in a constructional framework. These &#8216;weak&#8217; verbs, particularly frequent in spoken discourse, occur in a cluster of three related structures, revealing the same semantic meaning of &#8216;mitigation&#8217;. Other verbs can enter one of those syntactic patterns, but only the &#8216;weak&#8217; verbs can partake in all three of them. Each of the three verbs also enters other constructions, with different meanings.